I was in downtown Cedar Rapids on Tuesday to witness the city's second-largest crest of the Cedar River in recorded history. Pretty amazing since a "thousand year" flood inundated a majority of this city of 130,000 people only eight years ago. But back then there was little/no mitigation effort. According to ABC News, $10 billion damage occurred.

Major flooding continues in parts of the Upper Midwest this week. It’s the result of heavy rain that fell over the past couple weeks in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Now all that water is slowly working downstream from the tributaries of the Mississippi River into the river itself. In Iowa, the Cedar River is slowly receding, but river gauges at